Introduction

I bough the Mount & Blade Collection from steam a few months. It has proven to be a fun and challenging game. I started with Mount & Blades and then switched to Mount Blades Warband after finding Warband while adding another faction and other minor stuff that only enhanced gameplay.

Overview

Crusader Kings II has turned into a surprised treat. It is a challenge to learn because of its depth and many ways to start the game. There are 5 levels of authority with the top 4 playable at the start. Each have their own method of surviving and expanding your realm or not. I loose track of time each time I start playing this game which is the best complement you can give to any game.

Learning the game is an ongoing process. I often watch play through videos or read tutorials to learn of the mechanics. The game as a PDF manual and tutorial which hangs. In my first game I started in Spain which was mistake, I quickly went from having half of Spain to nothing. For learning the game Scotland is often recommended, but I think any country with a few enemies at the start would be a good choice.

I decided to give Drupal 7 a try. The new version of Drupal was released in January 2011 and after 9 months I hoped any issues where worked out. It incorporated several independent modules from Drupal 6 making them more easier to use.

Unfortunately there more than few commonly used Drupal 6 modules have yet to be updated to Drupal 7. That is part of the problem with open source development when the author of a module is no longer maintaining it, you need wait for someone to take over. Which could mean you.

To gain a quick understanding of Drupal 7, I took the 20+ online video courses Getting Started with Drupal 7 Tutorials from leveltendesign web site. They do an excellent job of helping a newbie to Drupal, learn how to use this CMS. Anyone looking to get started using Drupal 7 should watch them.

I have been looking for a CMS for a new site that will be repository of software with user ratings/reviews. So far I have been using WordPress to catalog the software as posts. I bought into the idea that WordPress is a great tool for using it as a CMS but have not seen the results I am looking for. It is \a blogging tool first and a CMS second.

So I tried Drupal 7 and found many features I am looking for but not all of them. I will need spend more time in using Drupal 7 to determine if it meets my needs.

So decided to do a search on “choosing a cms” and found some helpful articles.

How To Choose The Right CMS (2009) – WDD by Jason Mosley does a very good job of summing up what my thoughts on choosing a CMS and identify some CMSes that I have yet to try.

MajorGeeks.com is a large repository of new and old freeware/shareware for Windows and Macintosh. It offers direct downloads from vendor sites and their own file servers. This site has been around for a long time so if your looking for some old discontinued software, this site might have it. It does not games. It has editors, diagnostics, patching, tuning, and all sorts of geek software.

After downloading the latest versions of Ultimate Boot CD (dos\linux) and UBCD for Windows, I took a look at the popular downloads and found a few I will be checking out.

I started developing web sites on a free web host providers. They offered a unique web address I could use on my web site. However, when I switched web hosts, I could not use the web address at my new web host because the previous provider owned it. I might of been able to purchase it but I was switching providers for reason. When you change the web address of your web site; search engines, personal book marks, and web links from other web pages would still be pointing to the old address. There are ways to redirect your old web site to your new site name but the old site needs to exist for that to happen else your old visitors will end up on your previous providers generic pages.

To prevent this, purchasing a domain name for your web site provides you control over which web host your domain name points to. When you switch a web host you just configure your domain name for the new host. Domain names are purchased from domain registration providers. Most providers charge $10 to $20 a year. You will own that domain long as you continue to pay the yearly subscription.

I have been using free web hosts for a long time. They offer the opportunity to learn how to create and maintain websites using a variety of technologies while sharing information with others on the internet. Finding a reliable free web host can be challenging. Searching the internet resulted in my finding two articles that provide a good list of free web hosts to consider.

Call of Duty 2 was giving me issues. Many of the multiplayer maps were being reported as corrupted and I needed to delete them before they could be replaced. COD2 does not have an easy way to remove multiplayer maps which are downloaded while joining an online multiplayer game.

The only option I know of is to delete them manually yourself. In my case after the deleting about 6, I decided to guess and delete a bunch of old ones. This caused an issue and I decided to uninstall COD2. This gave me more issues so I tried to uninstall it manually, which turned out to be bad idea. I got COD2 cleaned off but during the reinstall, I could not install patch 1.3.

During the patch 1.3 install, I got the error I “Error: 1612 The installation source for this product is not available. Verify that the source exists and that you can access it.”

I was having trouble on my PC running Windows XP Home edition so I decided to try the SFC command. I ran it from a command window using “SFC /SCANNOW”. It prompted me for a Window XP CD so I loaded my Gateway Windows XP Home installation CD. After a bit, it asked me to “insert your Windows XP Home edition Service Pack CD now”. I do not have one. So I downloaded Microsoft’s ISO image for a Windows XP SP3 and created a CD with it. I inserted it and it did not like it.

So time for me troubleshoot using the internet. I found a post that suggested slipstreaming SP3 with my installation CD. I have done this past when creating a UBCD for Windows.